Signal Blog

This is the Moxie that created Signal.[0]

I'm pointing this out because people are acting like he's a bit naive. But Moxie has built a very successful company, without the need for VCs, and the tech is used by many big tech companies. Several use the signal protocol. It's a successful nonprofit building open source software.

If your focus is to make large amounts of money, maybe his isn't the best advice. But if you're trying to make a high quality product, then I think it is good advice. It depends which you prioritize: profits or money. Obviously you can have both, but when push comes to shove, will you sacrifice the product for profits or will you sacrifice profits for the product?

Personally, I believe as engineers our focus should be on the product. The profits are the domain of the business people. The contention we have is good, it creates balance. If engineers overly dominate products roll out too slow and only appeal to other engineers. If business people overly dominate we sell broken garbage. Neither situation is great but which side of the spectrum would you like to be on?

[0] https://signal.org/

[note] sure I know it's popular to hate on Signal but let's be real, this is technical nerdy shit we're arguing over (see the too much engineering side). Not something that's actually broken

I think you'll find "distributed decision-making" is no panacea. I joined a company recovering from a distributed governance model, and the big challenge was that nobody had enough decision-making authority for the firm to change quickly and respond to the evolving outside world. Bringing a whole room to consensus is a lot tougher than getting a few people to disagree-but-commit and move on with their day.

Funny enough, you even see this paradigm in secret messaging with Signal: the ecosystem is moving[0]. If you want a system that can evolve in response to external change, centralization is useful.

This isn't a defense of scrum, but a voice of opposition to running businesses as distributed utopias. It sounds great on paper, but you'll be out-competed by the faster-moving entities with centralized power very quickly.

[0]: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

This seems opposite to what their new president said last month:

"From the beginning, the team behind Signal put people and their needs at the core of their commitments. They understood that iron-clad security is fairly pointless if people can’t use, access, or feel comfortable with it. In other words, if my friends won’t use a messaging app, it doesn’t work as a messaging app. It works as a thought experiment, at best. Understanding this, Signal’s developers and designers created an app that honors people’s needs and expectations, while maintaining strict privacy promises."[1]

I'll echo the other comments here talking about network effects, onboarding friction, and social capital wasted convincing friends/family.

[1] https://signal.org/blog/announcing-signal-president/

>In addition, KakaoTalk does not immediately notify users if the other parties’ public key has changed...

The suggested alternative (Signal) at one point changed such warnings so that that they are much easier to miss and/or ignore[1]. They are now shown in tiny light grey text and the user no longer has to acknowledge the warning at all. So not a great counterexample...

It seems that these type of things go through a natural evolution. First security at the expense of usability and then later usability at the expense of security. We really need to come to terms with the hard problem of E2EE usability rather than continue to engage in this constant waffling...

[1] https://signal.org/blog/verified-safety-number-updates/

This is pretty fascinating. For easier reading, the Signal blog post [0] they link to is great.

Both Signal and Apple went with CRYSTALS-Kyber [1] as their post-quantum algorithm. If you're interested in the math, and maybe learned at some point about how classic public key cryptography is built on the idea that it's easy to multiply two primes, but hard to factor them, and how this (or other math problems) can be used as a one-way function to make encryption hard to break, the hard math problem that backs Kyber is the "learning-with-errors" [2] problem.

[0] https://signal.org/blog/pqxdh/

[1] https://pq-crystals.org/kyber/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_with_errors

Signal is one of the great undertakings of our time. And it's one of the last bastions of internet freedom.

A free-to-use global communications platform that doesn't censor, respects user privacy from the ground-up, and is run by a non-profit foundation that is faithfully dedicated to its mission. https://signal.org/bigbrother/.

We should support it. If you haven't already, then consider signing up for a recurring donation to the Signal Foundation. I try to give what I can afford, because I believe that digital freedom is essential for the progress of all humankind, https://signal.org/donate/

Without such projects, our civilization will stagnate and die in darkness.